By Matthew Kohut and Don Cohen As its name suggests, a Flight Readiness Review, or FRR, gives teams responsible for various elements of a NASA flight mission an opportunity to ensure technical questions raised at earlier reviews have been adequately dealt with and to raise concerns about anything else that might affect mission success.
By Matthew Kohut The opportunity to build a new launch vehicle that can loft humans into space does not come along often.
By Matthew Kohut Suppose you had to design a door within a lunar lander module that would shield the crew habitat from solar activity during a moon mission. Assuming this isn’t already your day job at NASA, how would you begin to devise a solution?
As told to Matthew Kohut by Butler Hine and Mark Turner When Pete Worden took over as the center director at Ames Research Center, one of the charters he came in with was to inject low-cost ways of doing spacecraft development into NASA as an agency.
By Matthew Kohut It’s a story so familiar it has achieved popular status as NASA’s creation legend: when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in October 1957, it shocked the flat-footed United States into action, locking the Cold War gladiators into a space race.
By Matthew Kohut Silicon Valley has long been the epicenter of high technology, but until recently NASA maintained a low profile in the neighborhood.
By Matthew Kohut Matthew Kohut of ASK the Academy met with Project Management Institute (PMI) CEO Greg Balestrero, PMI Board Member Yanping Chen, Academy Director Dr. Ed Hoffman, and ASK Magazine Managing Editor Don Cohen for a wide-ranging survey of the project management landscape today.
By Matthew Kohut “Every manager has the same complaint, regardless of his or her level,” says Dr. Jeffrey McCandless, strategic advisor for the Human Systems Integration Division at Ames Research Center.
By Matthew Kohut When Johnson Space Center’s Matt Lemke showed up for work as the project manager of the space-to-space communications system at the end of 1994, he looked forward to leading a team of NASA designers on the biggest project in his division.
